The Gift Of A Home Cooked Meal: Spring Awakening Banquet

People who love to cook and cook well don’t get invited to home-cooked dinners very often, unless it’s by other people who love to cook. I’ve had many of my friends tell me that they’d never invite me to dinner. I’ve told them not to worry about me. Don’t be intimidated. They laugh, uncomfortably and make reservations.

So I make it my business to have a lot of friends who love to cook. Whether you love to cook or not, if you love eating, it’s a true gift to be invited to dinner. For a while (cough, cough read: “years”), my friend Kian of the blog, Red Cook: Adventures from a Chinese Home Kitchen, had been saying he was going to invite us to a real Chinese banquet.

We’d eaten his signature Red Cooked Pork, the first time we met Kian at our first Chinese New Year Potluck event back in 2011. It was TO DIE FOR!

Oh, we’ve cooked together a couple of times. Once for a Sichuan dinner and the last year we had a dumpling party where we all made dumplings together. Over the years, we’d see Kian’s photos of his dishes and his banquets on Instagram and Facebook and drool.

This year, on the last day of Chinese New Year, it happened! Kian had us over for a banquet he called the “Spring Awakening Dinner”.

What a stupendous meal! Fourteen delicious dishes over ten courses. He cooked many of the dishes as he went along, but he was so well prepared it was seamless. Watching him prepare parts of the meal was fascinating. He fried a whole fish in a wok, scooping the oil over the parts that didn’t fit under the oil. He covered balls of red bean filling in meringue with an ice scoop and fried those. They were lightest donuts ever!

We feasted, but I didn’t leave in pain from being stuffed. You see, our eating dishes were small. The smaller dishes allowed for having a nice portion of each dish without making complete pigs of ourselves. Well, we totally made pigs of ourselves, but it didn’t hurt. We even had room for haw flakes at the end of the meal. These are red wafer candies from China that are made the fruit of the Chinese Hawthorn tree.